H. L. Mencken Quotes

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Fascism is not likely to be identical with the kinds on tap in Germany, Italy and Russia; indeed, it is very apt to come in under the name of anti-Fascism.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Monogamy, in brief, kills passion — and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man — the ideal civilized man — is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately — when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it.

I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

For all his compassion for family and close friends he lacked a larger compassion, one that embraced people whom he did not know or care for personally.

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded, and disbursed only when absolutely necessary.